Hot Wheels' new AR track turns toy racing into a warzone

Steam has 75 million active users, Valve announces at Dev Days

Steam has 75 million active users, Valve announced at the Steam Dev Days conference. The previous Steam user count, shared in October, was 65 million. Thanks, Steam users, for making the math on this one easy: 10 million users in three months. Wowza. Check out the regional breakdown below.

Steam Dev Days is a chance for developers and publishers – only, with no press around to cramp their style – to learn more about Steam Machines and developing for Valve platforms. Each attendee has already received a Steam Controller and is going home with a Gigabyte Steam Machine "for development and not Ebay," Tinybuild Games tweets. Check out the Gigabyte box here.

Valve founder Gabe Newell took the stage at Steam Dev Days and proposed the potential eradication of Greenlight, Steam's community-voted indie game approval system.

"Our goal is to make Greenlight go away," Newell said, transcribed by Hot Blooded Games CFO Dave Oshry. "Not because it's not useful, but because we're evolving."

The talks from Steam Dev Days should be available online later on, though the free Steam Machines are only for those actually at the conference. We know – that's nonsense.

January 15, 2014 - Valve kicked off its first-ever Steam Dev Days Conference by announcing the continued growth of Steam, a leading platform for PC, Mac, and Linux software. In addition, Valve detailed Steam's 2013 geographic performance to the more than 1,200 Dev Days attendees.

In the trailing three months the number of active Steam accounts jumped 15%, to 75 million from 65 million (announced October 2013). The growth was realized during a busy holiday release season and Steam's Pre-Holiday and Holiday sales.

In addition, members of the Steam publishing team gave attendees a geographic breakdown of Steam's 2013's sales revenue. While the data showed a virtual tie between North America (41%) and Europe (40%) for the lion's share of Steam's global activity, Russia and Brazil realized the largest year over year growth (2013 vs. 2012) as individual countries, respectively increasing 128% and 75%.

Steam Dev Days is a two-day conference in Seattle, WA for all developers and publishers working with Steam and/or the upcoming Steam Machines. For more information, please visit http://www.steamdevdays.com/